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DVD & Blu Ray are still strong contenders in the retail home TV/movie business, but they've dropped dramatically in software distribution (replaced by internet) & for personal uses (CD-R, DVDR) as backup or even for creating/showing/sharing home movies (replaced by internet, network shares, HDD PVRs & usb media).

When HD/BD where competing it wasn't a common thought among us that it didn't matter so much who won but what was on the horizon after them.

But with more and more high selling devices like iPads, netbooks and sub-notebooks not coming with optical drives as standard, online markets like iTunes, Hulu & Netflix providing out music and video needs and worldwide and local data networks improving it seems like it may no longer matters what's next.

Thoughts? Will the popularity of optical media in the 90s and 00s die in the 10s?

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For stuff like hardware-bundled software, it's a lot easier on the manufacturers just to stick the files on a server, than to print millions of CDs. Online distribution is getting better, even with the incredibly slow uptake of high-bandwidth internet. So for general technology, optical media is pretty much obsolete in some cases, and definitely on the way out in others. What doesn't help is the massive bloat of software nowadays. I don't want to have to download 120MB of iTunes updates every time I want to listen to music, or wait 20 minutes for needlessly large printer drivers to download from a slow server.

For TV and movies though, there is not yet a more efficient way to distribute 50GBs of data trivially. So Blu-rays will be around for a long time yet. Especially in Australia, where apparently they can't be bothered introducing Netflix or Hulu. And they wonder why we're such big piraters.

Even if they did introduce those services, which I'm sure they will eventually, I'd still buy Blu-rays. The quality is better than they'll ever manage to stream in a Flash window, they're damn cheap anyway, and there's a much greater sense of satisfaction to having all your favourite movies lined up on a shelf than there is a list under a user account.

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No. OSes still need to be placed on CDs and +1 to all the fast internets.

And you can't exactly trust backups into the Internets either.

Clouds only need a stiff breeze to disappate ...

Seriously though, building a machine from USB is fine, but you need to get the installer from somewhere. As pointed out, CD/DVD/BD/HD-DVD are all cheap to make, and don't suffer the problems of electronic based distribution, having said that seeing someone leave an optical device in a car for two hours in the sun doesn't help things either. Sure optical has been overtaken in terms of speed and data density by many other distribution forms, and I can't see anyone making more huge advances in the optical market (although the 140GB!? media has been developed for some time now) I think it will stay for quite some time. Hell I even still have some VHS tapes lying around :)